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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

The city of Marquette, Michigan had two separate TV stations warn viewers of a zombie apocalypse via the emergency alert systems including an announcement that “dead bodies are rising from their graves.” Hackers accessed the ESA of both PBS-affiliate WNMU Channel 13 and ABC-affiliate WBUP-TV Channel 10 sending out scrolling text as well as an audio warning about a zombie invasion.

The hacking prank also appears to have spread to Montana, as a TV station there also broadcast a warning about brain-eaters.

“Civil authorities in your area have reported that the bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and attacking the living,” read the alert that ran at CBS affiliate KRTV in Great Falls, Montana. Follow the messages on screen that will be updated as information becomes available. Do not attempt to approach or apprehend these bodies, as they are considered extremely dangerous.”

According to a news report at The Detroit News, both incidents appear to be the act of a single hacker bent on mischief and authorities are already investigating the event,

“Someone was able to get into the system and they sent out an alert about zombies,” Smith said. “It was basically talking about the dead rising to attack the living. As soon as we realized, we took it off line.”

WBUP saw the same type of audio alert at about 8:37 p.m. Monday, according to station manager Cynthia Thompson.

“It has been determined that a ‘back door’ attack allowed the hacker to access the security of the EAS equipment,” Thompson said in a statement on the station’s website. “ABC 10-CW 5 will continue to work with federal and state agencies, including law enforcement and security experts, on the investigation of this incident.”

The details of how the attack worked are sketchy and only come by way of the statement by WBUP station manager Thompson. It would appear that the EAS equipment for the stations both contained “back doors” perhaps for remote networking.

Statements by TV staff suggest that the hackers were not local to Marquette but that they had in fact been tracked. However, the FBI and other federal authorities will comment on their involvement so far.

This is not the first time hackers and mischiefmakers have used emergency broadcast systems to send warnings about zombie uprisings, which include not just TV systems, but also roadside hazard signs (which didn’t involve hacking but instead unsecured control panels.)

As after the EAS prank last year, this incident has caused the FCC to issue a warning to all participants in the Common Alerting Protocol system to use strong passwords and place their equipment behind firewalls.

Last year, the FCC started requiring EAS equipment holders (TV stations) to connect their systems to the Internet so that they could be coordinated. However, without specific guidelines for how they should secure that equipment it seems that many of them are exposed to the Internet and therefore easy access by hackers (the pranksters in this case.)

The most recent prank and the release of zombie warnings has led the FCC to once again urge those participating in the CAP system to reset their passwords and firewall their equipment.

About Kyt Dotson

Kyt Dotson is a Senior Editor at SiliconAngle and works to cover beats surrounding DevOps, security, gaming, and cutting edge technology. Before joining SiliconAngle, Kyt worked as a software engineer starting at Motorola in Q&A to eventually settle at Pets911.com where he helped build a vast database for pet adoption and a lost and found system. Kyt is a published author who writes science fiction and fantasy works that incorporate ideas from modern-day technological innovation and explore the outcome of living with those technologies.